Anaïs, 2 chapters: an exciting documentary (review)

Marion Gervais paints a portrait, ten years later, of a young Breton peasant woman who doesn’t let herself be told stories.

“I didn’t want to settle down at my age at the start… I was going to go back to school and settle down later, because working 80 hours a week to earn 300 euros a month is fine for five minutes.” Crouching in her field, Anaïs, slim body and blond head, tends her plants with care under the benevolent eye of Marion Gervais, the director of this documentary. With a frankness and an insolence that sometimes recall the formidable Sandrine Bonnaire of Homeless and lawless by Agnès Varda, this very talkative young woman continuously criticizes the system in which she has been evolving since she finally decided to establish herself as a herbalist. Everything is covered: the difficulties in establishing oneself, the inherent precariousness of the profession, the long working hours, the administrative work that does not make the task easy, sexism in the agricultural sector…

Ten years later—this feature film being a compilation of two films, made a decade apart—Anaïs has become an established farmer. Her new preoccupation is to bring Seydou, her Senegalese husband, to France, despite increasingly strict immigration laws, so that they can live together on the farm. And it doesn’t matter that these two films were not conceived as a diptych! Anaïs’s cheekiness and her fervor to wage battle against much greater enemies spontaneously forge a bond between them. And once you leave the theater, you won’t soon forget it!

Emma Poesy

By Marion Gervais. Documentary. Duration 1h44. Released on September 11, 2024